Dispatch from Torreón's Bureaucracy

I went to pick up a package from the local post office, which was not the horrid experience for which I'd been told to brace myself. There was a bit of a wait, which gave me the opportunity to compare the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary Mexicans with colonias named after them here in Torreón. The designation seems to have zero connection with the man's actual legacy.

Yes, they did have their colonia: Francisco I. Madero, Pancho Villa, Lázaro Cárdenas, Miguel Alemán, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría, José López Portillo, and Miguel de la Madrid.

No, they didn't: Venustiano Carranza (and he's from Coahuila!), Álvaro Obregón, Manuel Ávila Camacho, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo López Mateos, Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo, and Vicente Fox.

I forgot to check for them and didn't realize until I was driving home, which made me feel like Homer Simpson, but in any case I don't think they did: Plutarco Elías Calles and Emiliano Zapata.

No leader is without his flaws, but it's odd how those with colonias named for them include the most defective leaders of the last century: Villa was a bandit, Alemán presided over a kleptocracy, Díaz Ordaz and Echverría were butchers both, López Portillo was a thoroughly reviled economic incompetent, and de la Madrid was a generally ineffectual leader whose greatest legacy is the botched response to the Mexico City earthquake in 1985.

In contrast, Carranza and Obregón were titans of the Revolution. And although the rest of the men on the list (pre-Salinas, anyway; it seems premature to conclude that Carlos Salinas and his successors will never get a colonia) had no legendary accomplishments upon which to build a legacy, in view of the dubious nature of many of their colleagues' feats, a tranquil, uneventful presidency should count in their favor.

Also, I had to go pick up a set of papers at the high school from which recently deceased Fantasy Island star Ricardo Montalban graduated. I'd not been aware of his Laguna roots before his death last week. Fittingly, despite my having made an appointment, the papers were not available.